Through our preview journey in the past two years, we have learned a lot from interacting with thousands of customers undergoing digital transformation. We highlighted some of our customer stories (such as UPS, Equadex, and more) in our general availability announcement. This post covers conversational AI in a nutshell using Azure Bot Service and LUIS, what we’ve learned so far, and dive into the new capabilities. We will also show how easy it is to get started in building a conversational bot with natural language.

“To be honest, I’m a little worried about the bot hype overtaking the bot reality,” said M.G. Siegler, a partner with GV, the investment firm formerly known as Google Ventures. “Yes, the high level promise of what bots can offer is great. But this isn’t going to happen overnight. And it’s going to take a lot of experimentation and likely bot failure before we get there.”
The market shapes customer behavior. Gartner predicts that “40% of mobile interactions will be managed by smart agents by 2020.” Every single business out there today either has a chatbot already or is considering one. 30% of customers expect to see a live chat option on your website. Three out of 10 consumers would give up phone calls to use messaging. As more and more customers begin expecting your company to have a direct way to contact you, it makes sense to have a touch point on a messenger.

Facebook Messenger chat bots are a way to communicate with the companies and services that you use directly through Messenger. The goal of chat bots is to minimize the time you would spend waiting on hold or sifting through automated phone menus. By using keywords and short phrases, you can get information and perform tasks all through the Messenger app. For example, you could use bots to purchase clothing, or check the weather by asking the bot questions. Bot selection is limited, but more are being added all the time. You can also interact with bots using the Facebook website.

No one wants to download another restaurant app and put in their credit-card information just to order. Livingston sees an opportunity in being able to come into a restaurant, scan a code, and have the restaurant bot appear in the chat. And instead of typing out all the food a person wants, the person should be able to, for example, easily order the same thing as last time and charge it to the same card.
In a traditional application, the user interface (UI) consists of a series of screens, and a single app or website can use one or more screens as needed to exchange information with the user. Most applications start with a main screen where users initially land, and that screen provides navigation that leads to other screens for various functions like starting a new order, browsing products, or looking for help.
Jabberwacky learns new responses and context based on real-time user interactions, rather than being driven from a static database. Some more recent chatbots also combine real-time learning with evolutionary algorithms that optimise their ability to communicate based on each conversation held. Still, there is currently no general purpose conversational artificial intelligence, and some software developers focus on the practical aspect, information retrieval.

Ultimately, only time will tell how effective the likes of Facebook Messenger will become in the long term. As more and more companies look to use chatbots within the platform, the greater the frequency of messages that individual users will receive. This could result in Facebook (and other messaging platforms) placing stricter restrictions on usage, but until then I'd recommend testing as much as possible.

By Ina|2019-04-01T16:05:49+02:00March 21st, 2017|Categories: Automation, Chatbots & AI|Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, automated customer communication, Automation, Bot, bots, chatbot, Chatbots, Customized Chatbots, Facebook Messenger, how do chatbots work, Instant Messaging, machine learning, onlim, rules, what are chatbots|Comments Off on How Do Chatbots Work?
The goal of intent-based bots is to solve user queries on a one to one basis. With each question answered it can adapt to the user behavior. The more data the bots receive, the more intelligent they become. Great examples of intent-based bots are Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The bot has the ability to extract contextual information such as location, and state information like chat history, to suggest appropriate solutions in a specific situation.
It’s best to have very specific intents, so that you’re clear what your user wants to do, but to have broad entities – so that the intent can apply in many places. For example, changing a password is a common activity (a narrow intent), where you change your password might be many different places (broad entities). The context then personalises the conversation based on what it knows about the user, what they’re trying to achieve, and where they’re trying to do that.
Creating a comprehensive conversational flow chart will feel like the greatest hurdle of the process, but know it's just the beginning. It's the commitment to tweaking and improving in the months and years following that makes a great bot. As Clara de Soto, cofounder of Reply.ai, told VentureBeat, "You're never just 'building a bot' so much as launching a 'conversational strategy' — one that's constantly evolving and being optimized based on how users are actually interacting with it."
We then ran a second test with a very specific topic aimed at answering very specific questions that a small segment of their audience was interested in. There, the engagement was much higher (97% open rate, 52% click-through rate on average over the duration of the test). Interestingly, drop-off went wayyy down there. At the end of this test, only 0.29% of the users had unsubscribed.
It’s best to have very specific intents, so that you’re clear what your user wants to do, but to have broad entities – so that the intent can apply in many places. For example, changing a password is a common activity (a narrow intent), where you change your password might be many different places (broad entities). The context then personalises the conversation based on what it knows about the user, what they’re trying to achieve, and where they’re trying to do that.

Interface designers have come to appreciate that humans' readiness to interpret computer output as genuinely conversational—even when it is actually based on rather simple pattern-matching—can be exploited for useful purposes. Most people prefer to engage with programs that are human-like, and this gives chatbot-style techniques a potentially useful role in interactive systems that need to elicit information from users, as long as that information is relatively straightforward and falls into predictable categories. Thus, for example, online help systems can usefully employ chatbot techniques to identify the area of help that users require, potentially providing a "friendlier" interface than a more formal search or menu system. This sort of usage holds the prospect of moving chatbot technology from Weizenbaum's "shelf ... reserved for curios" to that marked "genuinely useful computational methods".